A Study On Musical Translation From The Perspective Of Actor Network Theory

The emergence and establishment of the Translation Sociology have been drawing more and more attention in recent years.This research paradigm regards translation as a social practice,pays attention to the interaction between social factors and translation activities,and makes analysis on translation production and the actors involved in the production process in a specific social context in order to explore the social features of translation activities.As one of the three theories of translation sociology,the Actor Network Theory(ANT)emphasizes that the generation of scientific knowledge results from the interaction of multiple actors in a specific field,and proposes to reveal the true nature of the society by reconstructing the interrelations and interactions among the actors.Musical is a comprehensive artistic genre,which demonstrates both musical and literary features,and it carries many cultural factors.Involving both musical and literary elements,the translation of musical songs puts forward higher requirements for translators.As a professional translator of domestic musicals,Cheng He has participated in the translation of nearly all the classical musicals introduced to China in recent years,and has made great contributions to Chinese musical translationsBased on the Actor Network Theory,this study makes a detailed analysis of Cheng He‘s musical translation practice from the macro and micro level respectively.At the macro level,based on the four processes of TRANSLATION proposed by ANT,this paper focuses on the process of Cheng He‘s musical translation,and further constructs the formation process of the musical translation network in which different actors correlate with each other.At the micro level,this paper makes a text analysis of two typical musicals translated by Cheng – The Sound of Music and Les Choristes to explore musical translation methods adopted.It is found that musical translation network is a dynamic system and the final translation is the result of the interaction among these actors.The translation of musical songs mainly focuses on the fidelity,singability and acceptability of the songs.